Tara Hamling’s ambitious and important book is provocative for the disciplines of both history and art history in several ways. Her book raises some key questions and challenges assumptions that have influenced how decades of students have understood the role of imagery in the English Reformation. In a series of well-argued chapters, the author unpicks and reorders our understanding of the existence, usage, display, and proper purposes of religious imagery in Elizabethan and Stuart Britain. Much of the evidence presented relates to the patronage of the middling sort at this period, and therefore the author also raises questions about the wider patronage of artists and artisans and the functions and meanings of the decorative within the domestic interior.

In its core thesis, the book raises the question of how English audiences dealt with reformation concerns about visual imagery, and critically, Hamling attempts to downplay past historical assumptions of a culture of English iconophobia. She argues in her conclusion that the book “set out to prove that the Reformation did not bring about an abrupt and wholesale rejection of the artistic traditions of the medieval past” (284), and it achieves this ably by the sheer number and range of newly published visual images that are handsomely illustrated. In scholarly times gone by this study might have amounted to little more than an architectural and decorative history of the houses of the gentry and civic elites. Yet, Hamling is an art historian interested in social and religious contexts of production and has brought us a different kind of book. It is one that happily marries the interpretation of reformed doctrine in Britain with the historiography of the decorative, incorporating an anthropological approach that asks questions about the spiritual allegiances, religious practices, and influences of the original patrons. As such, it deftly explores how religious beliefs and social sensibilities had a direct impact on taste in domestic interiors, at a time when this sector of society was becoming wealthier, conscious of its power within a wider social matrix and, critically, more visually articulate.

Early on in the structure of the book, the reader becomes familiar with the thorny question of religious change and its relationship with visual imagery. The author places the interpretation of the second commandment, “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” in a cultural context by exploring the use of all types of imagery found and used in both church and domestic interiors such as painted panels and cloths, embroidery, and plasterwork. A chapter on the making and remaking of houses owned by the gentry and yeomanry sets the scene for how members of the middling sort might decorate their interior spaces. The question of the spiritual lives of the inhabitants of such houses is explored in the next chapter, which looks at the daily practices of piety and rituals of religious observance. By looking at the personal importance of religion to the self-image of the middling sort, Hamling is able to tease out some of the ways imagery could be a form of social control and continual reminder about the structures of authority. This was most easily done by the combination of text and imagery that reinforced visual messages about the “all seeing god.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is a central chapter that journeys with the reader around the interior of the protestant household, looking at the types of imagery found in different parts of the house. For example, we learn that the subjects of suitable paintings for the parlor—where the family sometimes dined or entertained—included topics such as Dives and Lazarus that could usefully highlight the family’s awareness of the importance of charity to the less well off. In turn, the bedchambers within the houses of the gentry and middling sort often displayed far less imagery, but where they appeared they might suitably focus on exemplars of female piety such as St. Barbara, who symbolized chastity, allegories of virtue, or even biblical scenes such as Adam and Eve.

Typically of Yale art history books, this book is beautifully illustrated. The photographs act as a visual stimulus to the author’s argument about the importance of place, as many provide a significant amount of contextual information about architectural surroundings. Some of these images show reasonably simple plaster or carved wooden over mantels or wall paintings with religious subject matter in the homes of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century yeomanry, professionals, and merchants (such as those at Cowick Barton Inn and Holcombe Burnell in Devon, Knightland Farm, Herfordshire, and 8 Queen Street, Salisbury). Others depict more elaborate schemes such as those at Montacute House, Somerset, or the remarkable decorative painting at Knole, Kent.

This book builds on the work of art historians Anthony Wells-Cole and Maurice Howard, who have respectively teased out the importance of engraved source material on visual imagery at this date and explored the contexts and usage of architectural spaces within wider social spheres. If there are criticisms of this book they are minor, but some might wonder how a book that takes such a wide historical span (up to 1660) can really do justice to this topic. Hamling does concede that “attitudes changed and diverged dramatically over the course of the period” (284). And in fact, as the map near the front of the book depicting the appearances of religious images in domestic interiors by date indicates, the bulk of the book deals with 1580–1640. The argument is also tightly structured across the six main chapters, and perhaps because of this, the book is occasionally repetitive, but for students of this complex and remarkable period this does not mar its value. The book is the product of more than a decade of original research in this area, following Hamling’s DPhil; however, the outcome is far more enlightening than most standard revisions of doctoral studies, and her work will serve to open out other avenues of study, particularly in the interpretation of postreformation imagery.